Others are designed by people with no brain expertise whatsoever. Some are designed by neuroscientists in conjunction with major universities or brain health organizations. “When we see that we’re actually taking in lots of information, it helps to alleviate that feeling of helplessness and anxiety that we can feel when we can’t recall something.If your memory isn’t working as well as you’d like, taking an online memory test can help you know where you stand.īut there’s an overwhelming number of memory loss tests available online … where to begin? “I think it just helps to know that, as we get older, we still have the capability to learn, but we’re not using it the right way,” Ranganath said.
Cognitive ability isn’t necessarily declining with age it depends on the context. This suggests the relationship between aging and performance should be viewed with more nuance, he said. Those are the types of tests that older adults don’t perform well on.”īut they perform better than younger adults on different types of tests - those that focus more on creativity and decision-making. “Those usually require a narrow focus of attention on one piece of information: You have to focus on the information, remember it, and then remember it again later on. “There’s this prevalent idea in the literature that, as we age, we tend to perform worse on memory tests, which is true, but it’s also a result of the types of tests that we tend to use in the lab,” Amer said. In turn, it’s possible that the paradox of why older adults perform worse on most memory tests despite having more knowledge can be explained by something else: the tests themselves. These moments benefit from comprehensive knowledge. While “cluttered” is the favored phrase in the paper, its authors write that the word could be substituted for “enriched” or “elaborated.” While the clutter of irrelevant information can make it more difficult to remember a specific detail, excessive knowledge can also help an individual in certain situations - such as when there’s a need to be creative, make a decision, or learn something new. Meanwhile, memory cluttering isn’t entirely bad. For example, most research on older adults has been “based on samples of mostly white, highly educated, upper-middle-class individuals.” He thinks these findings would still hold up in a larger, more diverse study sample, but that research needs to happen to know definitely. Generally, there’s also a need in memory and aging science to include more diverse populations into study samples, Ranganath said. It’s possible the hippocampus might be “indiscriminately forming these extra associations between all these pieces of information,” Amer said. One proposed explanation links back to the hippocampus, the complex brain structure that plays a significant role in learning and memory. More research is needed to understand why reduced cognitive control can result in cluttering. “I would argue that internal distraction is far greater and always more challenging than external distraction.” “We often think of distractions as coming from the outside, but there are distractions of internal origin,” Fenton said. Their paper “makes a compelling case that, as we get older, part of the problem is that we get less selective,” said Charan Ranganath, a professor at the University of California, Davis Center for Neuroscience. This explanation stems from and is supported by the team’s review of several behavioral and neuroimaging studies. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.” “It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” Amer said.
This difficulty is described as “reduced cognitive control” and can explain the cluttered nature of older adults’ memory representations. Instead, “older adults might actually be forming too many associations between information,” Amer said.Ĭompared to young adults, healthy older adults (defined in the paper as 60 to 85 years old) process and store too much information, most likely because of greater difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, the analysis found. While some scientists think that as adults grow older, they begin to form “impoverished memories” - memories that contain less information relative to the memories of younger people - Amer and his colleagues have a different view. Tarek Amer is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Harvard Universities and the review’s first author.
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